


Urban Dreams

by cathtice



Category: Mage: The Ascension, Werewolf: The Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-05
Updated: 2017-04-05
Packaged: 2018-10-15 02:07:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 812
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10548232
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cathtice/pseuds/cathtice
Summary: City spirits are as real as any others, and all fairy tales are true.





	

There was a monster who was the wardrobe. His eyes were made of knots in the old pine boards, and his nose was the twists in the brass lock, and his mouth was the dark edges of the doors and when he yawned, he could eat little girls up whole. His white tongue drooled out of his mouth whenever mummy did the laundry and the towels couldn’t quite fit in his tummy, and his creaking voice was bony and loud in the darkness.

Once upon a time, the monster creaked and clattered and reached out with his spidery toy-shadowed arms to the girl in the bed as she wept in her sleep and gathered her up close to him. She was eaten, swallowed into his washing-powder-scented belly and slowly her tears stopped.

Her great grandmother had shown her the Wardrobe Monster, and the Mirror Fairy; the faces in the bushes and the whispers in the wind. Her great grandmother, past a hundred and white-haired and wrinkled, with sharp dog’s eyes and a wide, white-toothed grin, had told her all about them and shown her their faces. She was Rose-Red’s wolf-great grandmother, and Rose-Red never wanted her to leave. 

Rose-Red’s mummy found her in the wardrobe the morning after she’d cried herself to be eaten, and dressed her in black from her red-maned hair (tied out of the way with a black ribbon) to her callused toes (hidden from sight in patent black shoes and black socks with bows). Her mummy Eileen and her Nana Rose were wearing black too, and so were the zephyrs, dragging clouds of dust and soot around themselves; the signpost-eyes, coated in dirt and muck, and the cars growling lost along the road to mourn Rose-Red’s great grandmother wolf. 

The cemetery yews were whispering their sorrow, and the willows crying – willows cry over everything, but this was actually reason. The gravestone cherubs fluttered round Rose-Red’s head and settled on her shoulders, grey and gritty and comforting. She’ll be here again, they whispered. Nothing ever ends. And all the monsters and ghosts and the City itself mourned with Rose-Red and her mummy and her nana and the Alsatian at the edge of the cemetery that was lying curled up and hiding its nose beneath its tail (to hide the too-sharp snout and the too-bushy tail as well as to hide the tears in its not-dog-enough eyes).

Rose-Red grew up faster after that. Nana Rose wasn’t that old, but she was tired, and mummy wanted to move away from the city with so many painful memories. Wherever she went, though, the ghosts and the voices and the monsters were there, keeping her safe and showing her secrets that she’d never learn in the school she bunked off from most days. 

It wasn’t until Eileen died that Rose-Red (whose name wasn’t ever really that except when her great grandmother told her stories) was chained down. She turned into stone, like her name, when the council gave her to a foster family in Milton Keynes and the monsters weren’t there any more. She ran away, over and over again, desperately running for anywhere where the ghosts would talk to her and the world overlay itself with more than just steel wire and nets. The chittering cold spiders she only ever saw in the distance chewed on all the monsters trying to be born and killed them.

So Petra (see? Rose red and stone, all at once; as well as foundation and faith and City. Her great grandmother knew what her name would mean even when she was born, staring at the world with eyes the same grey as warm marble) learnt. Petra broke something around her and inside her, and took paint and spraycans and stones and shattered the institutional windows and changed the institutional signs and made the institutional webs warp and shatter. The official response was fear of juvenile hooliganism and hoodie-thuggery; she saw her fight as the only way to wake up the City and the spirits within it.

She left after that, barely sixteen and barely grown, to see the monsters and dreams of the Cities she loved, watch them grow and change and learn. She helped them grow up themselves; weeded out the webbing and the disease and gardened for the skyscraper-trees and urban jungles that were the newest children of the Umbral landscape. 

Petra doesn’t remember a time when she was Asleep; woken up with gentle stories and spirit charms, she only knows that the monsters in the shadows are real and are to be welcomed. Of course the world changes – but who cares? Still the cities rise, and still they grow; and without a gardener, they’ll be tangled through with weeds and hate and decay and will end up a cancer instead of the churches to possibility and the body politic that they should be.


End file.
